That was a huge wall of text - TLDR :
- Kagi has private investors
- Kagi has had some questionable uses of the private funding, such as opening a t-shirt company
- Kagi started as a AI focused company and pivoted to search
- Kagi is spread too thin over many different projects
- Kagi doesn’t take privacy, or user data seriously
Fair enough, but as long as google, bing, ddg, etc get more and more unusable there will be fans of alternative searches
Even if Kagi crashes and burns, it has demonstrated there is a market demand for useful search results that users pay for directly.
FWIW I don’t use Kagi because of the login / payment info requirements, so I agree broadly with the author. As bad as public searching is, its good enough to not give up privacy.
Thanks for the summary!
I’m not a Kagi user but I see people enthusiastically promote it often on Lemmy so I thought it was worth sharing this. After doing this post I noticed it is on HN as well, with 100 comments : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40011314
I’ve been really enjoying Qwant since I started using it after Mozilla announced their partnership.
I am super annoyed when the “turn of ad blocker” popup shows itself. They’d get many more users by not using that and serving ads from the same domain as searches. I get that they have to pay for their services somehow.
